SIGHT AND SOUND TECHNOLOGY

PODCAST EPISODE 73

Stuart Lawler: Hello and welcome in to the Sight and Sound Technology podcast. My name is Stuart Lawler. It’s time for another Sight Village countdown. This is episode number 73.

Stuart Lawler: Thank you to everybody who’s been getting in touch to say they’re enjoying these Sight Village countdown podcasts. It just gives you a little sense of what you might expect if you come to Sight Village Central in a couple of weeks and you can get in touch with us if you want to, podcast@sightandsound.co.uk. We always love to hear from you and, of course, we enjoy getting your feedback.
Now, coming up today, I’m catching up with Vanessa Vigar from Envision to find out all about what’s happening in the world of AI and smart glasses.

Stuart Lawler: As we publish this podcast, as I record this piece, we are three weeks to the day away from Sight Village Central. It kicks off on 17th July. Lots of us from Sight and Sound Technology will be there, waiting to meet you and talk to you and show you the technology that we are passionate about. And something that’s taken the world by storm, I think, over the last couple of years and I think a company who have changed the world, are Envision, with their smart wearable tech and Vanessa Vigar is Chief Marketing Officer with Envision.
Vanessa, I hope you don’t mind me saying you’ve changed the world and I don’t know how you feel about that, but you are very, very welcome to the show and great to have you.

Vanessa Vigar: No, it’s great. We think we have, but it’s lovely to hear it from somebody else.

Stuart Lawler: Yes, you definitely have. Great to have you here. Can we talk a bit about you first, because I know you’re in the Netherlands, but you don’t have a Dutch accent?

Vanessa Vigar: No, I don’t. I know the Dutch speak very good English, but I am originally British and I am actually now a dual national. I became Dutch a couple of years ago as well. But I do herald from the UK originally.

Stuart Lawler: What brought you to the Netherlands and how did you end up living there?

Vanessa Vigar: Well, it’s a very long convoluted journey, but to keep it really short, I actually met my husband at a technology event in the music business, believe it or not, in France in 2003 and then after much commuting over the little channel between the Netherlands and the UK, I moved over to the Netherlands around the end of 2003 and then ended up here ever since.

Stuart Lawler: Okay. It’s probably worth saying, you have low vision yourself, right?

Vanessa Vigar: I do. I’ve got Retinitis Pigmentosa. I was diagnosed pretty late in life. Just for transparency, I’m in my mid 50s. I was diagnosed at 30. What happened with my vision was a gradual process but I now have, on a well lit day, anywhere between 50 and 55% vision, but of course when it’s dark or overcast, it’s goes very low very quickly unfortunately.

Stuart Lawler: Now, I’m trying to remember in terms of Envision how long they’ve been around. I think about four or five years. Did you join from the start?

Vanessa Vigar: No. We started off as an app only, for those who remember from those days and then the glasses were introduced around 2020 but really with COVID and everything, only came onto the market properly at the end of 2021, 2022. CSUN US event was our big actual final breakthrough, if you will. I joined just before then. So, I’ve been with Envision now just two years.

Stuart Lawler: Okay. The glasses, and we will talk about some of the new features in a moment, but the whole concept of wearing glasses and getting this instant feedback is amazing and, I think, for me, one of the big wow factors as a totally blind person, this idea of calling an ally, getting that security of a trusted friend or family member, all that stuff is incredible. Is it exciting to be in the midst of all that all the time?

Vanessa Vigar: It is. I love it. I herald from actually content side, from the media business, but I moved over to the technology side of media for many years and, so, moving now to assistive technology, where there’s a chance for me to put my marketing experience, my software and my love of cool tech and good people, as I say, together, that’s just brilliant. Obviously you’re somewhat invested. I kept it very much to myself about being visually impaired and I shouldn’t use those words but low vision, I guess, especially in my workplace. I felt it was hard enough being a woman in technology and then one who can’t see very well was just difficult. There were no role models and there was no-one really around to support me. It got to a point where I was thinking this is more energy sapping than it’s rewarding. Then this opportunity with Envision came along and it was like now this could actually be put to good use. In a weird way, I’m very proud of my eye condition. I’d rather think positively of it than negatively. Of course, I stumble over things and it’s frustrating as hell, but on the other hand I can put it to really good use now and that’s fantastic.
But it is exciting being in the middle of it. Envision are probably known for their glasses and the app, but we’re actually a software company. So, what that means is that we’re actively looking and developing and putting Envision wherever we can, any kind of wearable tech. The glasses make complete sense because it keeps your hands free, but we are trying out as many of these other smart glasses. I can’t give too much away now, but we’ve got some really exciting new devices being trialled and tested at the moment. What is really great is that we’re creating this accessibility platform, if you will, where other apps and software for the blind and low vision community can jump on board. We already did that with Aira around this time last year, believe it or not. My goodness, time flies. Cash Reader is on there. We are talking to all the usual companies and working with other companies as well. We use the BlindSquare QR-code reader, for instance. One of our missions there is really to become the de facto accessibility platform for the blind and low vision community that can run on any wearable device.

Stuart Lawler: I’m just making a note as you say all that, to make sure to get you back, if you’re going to be having more stuff to reveal. You’ve just teased us there a little bit.

Vanessa Vigar: You’ll be the first to hear it.

Stuart Lawler: Okay. Before we start talking about some new features and maybe what’s cool with glasses at the moment, one point there that you made that stood out to me, the fact that maybe you were hiding your vision impairment going through different workplaces, then you came to this company and you felt more comfortable maybe, but I’m sure from the company’s perspective as well, they suddenly have access to a low vision person with a wealth of experience that they can get feedback internally from. It sounds like a really good match.

Vanessa Vigar: It was. I looked at the job description for a week. I was really, should I, shouldn’t I. Then I contacted Karthik Mahadevan, our CEO, and we were chatting within a hour with each other. It’s just really meant to be. I come from a different industry, but to be honest, as we’ve been growing our marketing team, I’ve yet to find anybody who’s got marketing experience to the blind and low vision community and the relevant software experience as well. It’s a rare combination. So, we’ve been developing that ourselves. It is a great position to be in, I think. We have other people in our team as well, who have no sight at all. Vicky, who runs our community, was born blind. Bob Roehm, our US sales team, has lost his sight. So, we also tap into our community of testers. We have an incredibly passionate beta tester group community and they keep us real.
I need to be mindful that I’m only one subset of the people whom we’re trying to help, but it does help. You’re quite right.

Stuart Lawler: Vanessa, thank you for giving us a little glimpse, because, as we said before we were coming on air, the people behind the technology are sometimes more important on this podcast. I prefer to find out a bit about people.
We’re not going to go into what Envision is. There’s been lots of webinars and millions of podcasts, loads of stuff about that, so people can search or if you want to know more about Envision, give us a call. But, Vanessa, I suppose everyone’s been talking about AI and ChatGPT and I think at CSUN you guys launched some pretty cool features.

Vanessa Vigar: Yes, we were playing around at CSUN. I can give you a little secret here. We were really hacking around to give some user cases for it and it was very, very quick. I think this is somewhat reflective of the innovation in our team and the focus and the passion for the mission, but very quickly we could productise what was a beta testing idea and concept. So, what we’ve done is we’ve taken ChatGPT and GPT-4, which are two AI models there, and we’ve built a product called Ask Envision. Now, currently Ask Envision is productised. It’s on the glasses. We are doing software updates roughly one a month at the moment. So, it’s important to be on the latest update for lots of good reasons. One of them is that Ask Envision is there. So, what that does, is that if I use my Scan Text feature, for instance, I can scan a piece of text and then I can ask questions of it using Ask Envision. So, what that means is that currently it’s really amazing, you can scan anything, any piece of text, a book, a newspaper, a magazine, whatever it is, and it will read it beautifully back to you, but sometimes that can be time consuming. We’ve got a really nice example of Karthik at CSUN using Ask Envision to scan a menu and he scanned the menu and then he could ask questions back on it, like, tell me what’s vegetarian or what’s under $20 or what’s on the desserts, is VAT included or are tips included. That’s the kind of context you want. It’s lovely to hear what all the options are but to quickly get context of what you need. I live in the Netherlands. I do speak Dutch, but writing and reading Dutch, it takes me so long and I’m getting letters in from our lovely tax authority. So, what I can do, is I can now scan a tax letter, for instance, or some document from the authorities here and I can ask it to summarise the text and I can also ask it to summarise the text in English, which is mind-blowing for me, because I had to really run to my husband for that, because, sighted or not sighted, it was actually a language challenge. It’s actually a fantastic translation tool as well, which is something we’ve discovered in the process.

Stuart Lawler: So, you can scan any piece of text and I saw the video that you mentioned with Karthik and I think you guys were putting it out on social media quite a bit. Will that do something similar for photographs?

Vanessa Vigar: It’s really interesting, because we actually did a webinar yesterday and Karthik Kannan, who’s our CTO, did this with the New York Guild for the Blind and I’ll pop that up on our socials and share that with you, Stuart, as well, but he actually demoed a very early, not even beta, but further back, example of just that. So, what we can do now is I can do Describe Scene, so I can ask my glasses to take a picture of what it sees and what it will do then is also go back and use the AI to go into really vivid detail about what’s there, but it also allows you to then ask questions of that image and that is game-changing. So, if you’re walking into any kind of environment and you want the glasses to tell you what’s around, it will do a Describe Scene or it will use the Explore mode to tell you what’s around you and you can then use Ask Envision to give you more context around that. I’ve got so many ideas in my head of how we would use this. I could even imagine it taking pictures of photographs and you can ask it who’s in the picture. Bear in mind, that with Envision, you can teach faces, so friends and family, colleagues, whoever, so that when the glasses see that person for you in an environment, they’ll name them for you and the same in photographs sometimes. With Ask Envision, there’s no reason why it can’t give you more context. I have wonderful ideas of going to an art exhibition and being able to take pictures with it and then asking it information. Even now, the intelligence goes way further than the information in the text. So, we use a lovely write-up of The Girl With The Peal Earring, which is a very famous Dutch painting and we use that in our demos. It has a short paragraph of text, that this was painted by Vermeer and it’s a picture of a girl with a pearl earring, obviously, so it’s very descriptive, but I then asked the text back and I asked it when was the painting painted and it gave me the year of the painting, where is it hanging now and it told me which museum in the Netherlands it’s located. That wasn’t even in the document. It learns, so let’s not get spooked here, but it’s learning, so the more we use it, the more we teach it.

Stuart Lawler: I think you make a good point when you say, let’s not get spooked. We’ve been reading a lot about ChatGPT and it’s amazing and yet it is scary, sometimes, and it is worrying, but this is putting AI to real good.

Vanessa Vigar: Yes, I think that’s a really important point. Like any game-changer, think of the internet, the initial reason it was created was for good, for sharing information, but there’s always the other side to it, but we are doing that and we follow our values and our principles around that as well. We are watching very carefully how it develops and we’ll always have the best interests of our community at heart, of course, but it is going to be very interesting how it moves forward. I’m super excited.

Stuart Lawler: I am as well. One of the other things I wanted to ask you, I think you made some changes recently when you’re connecting to wireless networks that streamlines the whole thing a little bit.

Vanessa Vigar: Correct, yes. It’s tricky and when we onboard people, we do this lovely 90 minute onboarding. People get it, then we help them get set up on their Wi-Fi and their hotspots and the idea is that you don’t ever have to go back there again, for that. It’s not complex or anything, it’s just different. So, we’ve done several things. We have a Wi-Fi wizard now on the glasses, which makes it really easy to do step by step. I actually got Stefanie from your team up and running with her glasses using the Wi-Fi wizard yesterday. That was great to hear her using that.
Then the other one is Quick-Switch, which is really nice, so once you are set up between maybe a Wi-Fi network at home, maybe your hotspot when you’re out and about or Wi-Fi network at a friend’s or a workplace, you can Quick-Switch between those networks and just jump in and out.
In the latest update, which was I think last week, we’ve taken eight out of ten of our key features offline. So, you can use Scan Text offline now. You can’t use the Ask Envision feature, which does need a connection and you can’t make video calls, because obviously that needs a connection, but pretty much everything else. What that means is that if you’re heading out and you’re going somewhere new and you don’t want to use your phone hotspot or you can’t or with this beautiful weather, you want to go out and have a picnic or sit at the beach or something and you can’t get a connection, then you don’t have to, you can still read your books or read the documents. You can still use Instant Text, which is super cool for just capturing quick information around you. We’ve had that offline feature for quite a while but the offline feature for Scan Text and Bulk Scan, where you have multiple pages, is new, is brand new. We’ve seen that that’s also really fast, it gets the information to you really fast.
Online is fine, as I wrote in our blog about it all, because that does give you things that give you a little bit more context, you can use the Ask Envision feature on top of that and it does mean that you can use things like Document Guidance, which is really important when you’re holding a document.
I encourage people to go and check that out. Then the other updates that we’re super excited about is this Describe Scene and finding objects and finding people. What we’ve also done now is clock orientation. Before, we took a picture and it would describe the scene or rather, if I was doing Explore, I’d walk into my office here and it would say, “Computer, laptop, chair, keyboard,” but it wouldn’t actually give me the clock orientation. Right now, I’m sitting in front of my laptop and it would say, “Laptop 12 o’clock,” and my window is to my left, so it would say, “Window at 9 o'clock.” And you can move around. That’s just wonderful context. We’ve added more objects as well, so we’ve got stairs in there now. Yay! And doors and door handles and things. So, we’re getting there. We’re working through our lists of requests from our community. We don’t have a limitless number of brilliant engineers, I love our engineers and I wish we did but they’ve been focusing and following up on this. So, this is now all in the latest update, which is super cool.

Stuart Lawler: It does really show that you’re listening to your customers, the responsiveness I’ve seen. We’ve talked about this before with other companies that we work with as well, but just the responsiveness, the fact that people do come back quick, that you guys are releasing updates very frequently, and you also have a very strong social media presence, there’s loads of webinars. I think you’re very open to just hearing feedback from people, aren’t you?

Vanessa Vigar: Yes, we have a community. I mentioned my colleague Vicky earlier. We actually brought Vicky on board half a year ago, I guess, to really work on giving the community the support that it deserved and I describe our community as our beating purple heart in the company and I genuinely mean it, because everything we do in the company, literally everything, loops back in with the community, from customer support to product development to marketing to communications, strategy, everything. We had people who had been supporting us since the get-go, since we were a concept app for a master’s thesis that Karthik worked on, through to people who literally bought off a promise. Our pre-order customers are a very special group of people and we appreciate that and we know also that as we get bigger, there are going to be people with expectations that are different to perhaps where they were a few years ago. We’ve got more products in the market. We’re getting used to faster phones and easier access in some areas of our lives, but I still think assistive technology as a sector has got a long way to go and I just hope that as a software platform, we can work with partners as well to just take that a little forward a little faster, I hope.

Stuart Lawler: It sounds like the future is bright. It sound like you guys are extremely busy and you’re going to be doing loads and loads of stuff in the future and we want to bring you back to talk about those things.
Vanessa, before we let you go, people who are users already, who currently have the glasses, the features that you just mentioned, are they compatible for those users, can they upgrade?

Vanessa Vigar: Of course they can. So, let me explain how we’re working with that. All our software updates of any kind are totally free at the moment, so you just need to go into your glasses. We send alerts through the Envision app and we send emails out to people every time there’s a software update. So, there has been one last week, so I do encourage you to get that. Just go into your settings on your glasses, check in software and then the glasses will fetch a new update for you. It’s not a super heavy one but it’s a good one.
We are going to start introducing subscriptions in January 2024, but not until people have had their glasses for a year, so even if you’re buying Envision glasses up until December 31st, you’re still going to have a whole year of free subscription and all the software that’s on there and all the software that’s launched and new features and new developments will still be free for that year. It also means that after that time, we’re still going to support all those features. It’s not like your glasses are suddenly not going to work. Everything that you have on the glasses is going to be supported. It’s just all that new stuff that’s coming in a year after you’ve bought, from January next year, there is a subscription for that. It’s a nominal amount, it’s really low, but we’re going to be announcing more of that with your marketing team in the near future.

Stuart Lawler: Okay. Stay tuned to social media, websites and all that kind of stuff and if you are interested in the Envision glasses at the moment, then stay tuned, because there will be some price reductions, of course, as part of Sight Village.
Vanessa, it’s been lovely to catch up with you. Will you come back again, because it would be nice to hear some more?

Vanessa Vigar: I would love to. Thanks for having me. We’ve never managed to sort of sit down. I think at the last show, we were both so busy we didn’t get a chance.

Stuart Lawler: I know. We will get to do it soon. For the moment, thank you for all that you do and stay in touch.

Vanessa Vigar: I’ll see you at Sight Village.

Stuart Lawler: Brilliant. Thanks, Vanessa, take care.

Vanessa Vigar: You too. Bye.

Stuart Lawler: Thanks a million to Vanessa Vigar there, thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Vanessa Vigar from Envision and it’s really interesting when you see all that Envision have done in a relatively short amount of time, starting off with an app and then bringing out the smart glasses and some of the things that Vanessa alluded to there in that interview, I have to say I’m very, very excited to know more about. So we’ll have to bring Vanessa back onto the show.
Now, that’s just about it from this edition of the podcast, but remember, we always love to hear from you, podcast@sightandsound.co.uk. Please do get in touch and if you’re coming to Sight Village Central, we’ll see you in a couple of weeks, but it’s not goodbye yet for a few weeks. We have more Sight Village countdown podcasts coming, so keep an eye on our podcast feed and social media and you’ll find out lots more.
Until then, from everybody at Sight and Sound Technology, this is Stuart Lawler saying take care, goodbye and thank you for listening.